The present invention relates generally to plastic fasteners of the type used to attach tags to pieces of fabric and more particularly to a plastic fastener of this type which, once attached to a piece of fabric, is difficult to remove therefrom intact.
Plastic fasteners of the type used to attach tags to pieces of fabric, such as articles of clothing, product labels, and the like, are well known in the art and widely used in the retail industry. Typically, such fasteners comprise an elongated plastic member having a first end shaped to define a cross-bar (also commonly referred to as a "T-bar"), a second end shaped to define a paddle, and a thin filament portion interconnecting the cross-bar and the paddle. The cross-bar is adapted to be inserted first through a tag and then into a desired piece of fabric; the paddle is appropriately sized and shaped to keep the tag from being pulled off the filament portion. Typically, such fasteners are mass-produced by a molding process in either one of two different forms known as fastener stock. One type of fastener stock, which is shown in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 3,103,666 and incorporated hereinto by reference, comprises a plurality of fasteners joined together at their respective cross-bars by an orthogonally disposed runner bar. The other type of fastener stock, which is shown in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,955,475 and incorporated hereinto by reference, comprises a plurality of fasteners arranged in an end-to-end alignment, the heads and opposite ends of successive fasteners being joined together by severable connectors so as to form a continuously connected fastener stock.
Typically, the cross-bar portion of a single fastener is separated from a quantity of fastener stock and then inserted through a tag and into a piece of fabric with a hand-held apparatus commonly referred to as a tagging gun. (Connections, if any, between the paddles of a pair of adjacent fasteners are severed by pulling the tagging gun away from the piece of fabric after the cross-bar of one of the fasteners has been inserted thereinto.) Examples of tagging guns are illustrated in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,024,365, 4,121,487, and 4,456,161, all of which are incorporated hereinto by reference.
While plastic fasteners of the type described above function well in their intended purpose, it is nonetheless known that certain unscrupulous consumers have, on occasion, engaged in "ticket-switching" wherein the tag from a low-priced item is switched with the tag from a high-priced item. As can readily be appreciated, "ticket-switching" requires that either the fastener holding the low-priced tag or the fastener holding the high-priced tag be removed intact from its respective item so that it can later be manually re-attached to the high-priced item with the low-priced tag. Typically, such removal of the plastic fastener is accomplished first by positioning the cross-bar so that it is parallel to the filament (i.e., by pulling on the cross-bar to create some slack in the filament and then bending the end of filament adjacent to the cross-bar so that the cross-bar is aligned with the remainder of the filament) and then by pushing the cross-bar and the filament back through the same opening in the piece of fabric through which they were originally inserted.